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Thursday, January 22, 2015

Review: Revive Me by Charity Ferrell

When I lost him, I lost
myself. Tessa Benson is lost. The most important person in her life is
dead. And everyone she loves left with him. She’s doing everything she
can to mask her pain. Even if it means traveling down the road of
destruction. Dawson Thomas has loved her for years. But she's his dead
best friend’s sister. He made a promise to stay away from her. He also
promised to always protect her. She’s destroying herself and time is
running out. Will he hurt her by keeping his word or break his promise
to save her?

Whew. This one was a doozy. I wavered between two and three stars and finally settled on two. Revive Me was just all over the place for me. I have quite a few reasons why ... I'll highlight a few of those I guess.

This isn't a first novel for this author, so I expected a lot from her. I don't think that I go easier on new authors but I do find that I put higher expectations on an established author. Okay ... the book was a bit boring. I skipped I don't know how many pages just to get through this one. Is that the right thing to do? Absolutely not. If I'm going to review a book, I should read each and every page but after a while on this one, it was either skip some stuff or just file it under Did Not Finish and be done with it and I hate doing that. So skipping some pages was the only way to get to the end.

In the beginning of the novel, I was sadly and grossly fascinated with "watching" the main character (Tessa) just spiral out of control. I was excited to see this happen because I think that there is some author magic involved in the rebuilding of that same character. It can transform a book from MEH to HELL YES! But unfortunately, I just didn't get there and the reason is because it was just too much. I mean, come on. And there is a big spoiler here so if you don't want to know, don't read anymore of this review!! You've been warned! Okay ... so the main character lost her brother. And lost her best friend. And she's depressed. And she's an aspiring alcoholic. And she does drugs. And she lost her V-Card to a bad boy who dumped her. And she's a cutter. And she has to take care of her little brother because her parents are alcoholics. And kids at school slut shamed her. It was just so much and so unrealistic. So, so, SO unrealistic. After the 847th thing went wrong in this girl's life, I just totally checked out.

That's it. That's all I'm going to talk about. OOOH! Okay, one more thing ... I DID NOT appreciate that most of the characters had names that started with the letter D. Petty, I know. But again, it was just a ridiculous amount. I mean, I know that in real life, you're going to have friends that have the same first initial and it's totally normal. But her best friend was named Daisy, her boyfriend was named Dawson, her brother was Derrick and her dad was Darryl. Overkill. It was hard to keep track of the dude names and remember which one had which issue that was unrealistic and the whole thing just ended up annoying me. I mean, two D names is okay, three is pushing it but 4 was just ridiculous.